Dendrogram

This is a dendrogram, a graph that creates clusters of songs based on their features. On the next page we will find a Heatmap for what features have been considered in the dendrogram. Clusters may be counted like every new branch. As you can see, the first cluster formed is only the song Passionfruit vs all the other songs in the playlist. This is interesting because as we have seen in this entire Portfolio, Passionfruit is one of the most popular drake songs ever made. On the next page we can evaluate the clusters a bit more with the created heatmap.

This dendrogram used the average linkage cluster method which is a safe middle between the single linkage and complete linkage methods. Even with the average method, the clusters are not that clear. They are really small. The few balanced branches are found starting from the song ‘Controlla’ in the graph. We will also analyze this in the Heatmap on the next page.

Heatmap

This is the heatmap of the clusters found by the clustering method. As we can see, the clusters are really not that obvious. Only one single outlier really pops out. Ones again it is our beloved Passionfruit. This seems to be the only song that scores really high on instrumentalness. This seems reasonable when we listen to the song, it really differs from the “basic” Hip-Hop recipy of clear Bass and Snare.

We can see that the branch from “Circo Loco” up until “No Guidance” is formed by the colomn C and B. And that the final two rows might be based on Energy. But i do not think this gives that much information about my Corpus. Why? that is what i need to still find out.

SICKO MODE

SICKO MODE is a songs by drake and Travis Scot. This is a great example of a song of drake in collaboration with a die-hard Hip-Hop artist. One of the characteristics of Hip-Hop music is the clear beat. In the graph this is clearly visible. There is a clear line at just around 300 BPM. It is so clear that there only is a barely visible line at the lower tempo octave (around 150 BPM). The special thing about this song is that it is a mix of three different Hip-Hop songs. One of the criteria of mixing songs together, is that the beat is the same. This is clearly the case, but we can see the periods in the song where one song slows over into the other. This is seen at 110 and 170 seconds. Where at 110 the tempo is increased by a little, to eventually mix in the new song with again the clear beat.

At the beginning of the song the tempo estimation is having a hard time, this is due to only being vocals where the onset is not that easy to find. The estimation varies a little but eventually the beat kicks in and settles at 300BPM.

(For my peers. The BPM is estimated at 300BPM. That seems a little high to me. If you listen to the song there is a high-hat played at what i think is 16th notes. Is this the reason that it settles at 300? )

Tempo, Duration and Volume

In this graph we compare tempo, loudness and duration in sections. Because it takes a lot of time to load the data from the corpus for this comparison, i only used 25 songs per category. I compared the top 25 songs of drake, with 25 songs from the Hip-hop charts, and 25 songs from the pop charts. It stands out that a lot of drake songs have low Mean Tempo. Might that be a trademark for drake? Another interesting finding is that some songs in the Hip-Hop chart score pretty high on the SD Tempo. Where a lot of the top drake songs score more like the songs in the pop chart.

This might be a little fast to conclude due to the little sample size. For my final portfolio i would like to plot this graph with some more data.

Drake - Passionfruit chords

In this section we are comparing the keys and chords of two songs. The first song “Passionfruit” is seen before. This is the best scoring song of Drake. The other song is “Rockstar by Postmalone”, the number one in the Billboard Hip-Hop top 100. Right here we see the chordogram of “Passionfruit” as we can see, that Gb7 is the most obvious followed by Ab7, Eb7 and A7. In the next page we will compare this to the chordogram of “Rockstar”. For both graphs the best visualization was found with the Euclidean distance metric and the Manhattan norm.

Hip-Hop - Rockstar chords

This graph is more clear in my opinion. In the beginning of the song (about the first 10 seconds) we see a lot of yellow colors in the graph. This is due to the bass-less intro where there only is a flute playing. When the rest of the instruments kick in, we see the A7 and Eb7 as the most prominent chords. When we compare this to the chordogram of “Passionfruit” we see that A7 and Eb7 also are found, just not as the most prominent chords.

We may say that the A7 and Eb7 chords are most likely used a lot in Hip-hop music. To go into the question of this portfolio, we will also compare the chordrogram of Passionfruit with one of the best scoring pop songs of today.

Pop - Flowers chords

In this graph we can see that the song ‘Flowers’ has ocurences of the chords D7, A7, E7. We can also see some color change at G7 and C7. This differs quite a bit from “Passionfruit” and “Rockstar”. The only overlapping chord we can find is A7. Another interesting feature of this song is that all the cords are seventh chords. This means that it are all triads with an added note forming an interval of a seventh above the cords root.

Passionfruit

Just adding some text to see what it looks like in the storyboard

Started from the bottom

Passionfruit

Started from the bottom

Explanation

Mode, Valence and Energy

Started from the bottom

Is Drake the greatest Hip-Hop artist? Or just another Pop creator?

Drake claims he is a creator of Hip-Hop music. He is a widely known artist who scored some great hits in his career. Some people might say that, especially some of his most popular songs, are more towards the Pop genre. They say that these mainstream songs are not worth the title of Hip-Hop. When I found this opinion I started looking at some of his Top Songs. When listening to the songs, I get where the opinion comes from. This is why I would like to find out if the Top Scoring songs actually are more towards the Pop genre.

For the Portfolio I have created a playlist with about 25 of the best scoring Drake songs. A note is that some of the songs are in collaboration with another artist that might be more accepted in the Hip-Hop scene. When this is the case, it will be addressed in project. Furthermore I have found the billboard Hip-Hop top 200, and the Pop chart from ….. In this portfolio we will analyse some structures to see if Drake is a Hip-Hop or Pop artist.